Joe Luger on Learning

8 July 2018

An interesting series of tweets from Joe
Luger found it’s way into my feed, and I
thought it was worthwhile enough that I’d kinda
quote/paraphrase/reformat it here (as a means of elaborating it
(aiding my own learning). The rest of this is pretty much verbatim
from Twitter …

Learning requires memorization first

learning takes memory. In order to learn a skill or set of
information, its components must be memorized on the most basic
level. Memory is like the base of the learning pyramid. To perform
higher level martial arts skills, you must memorize the steps of the
basics. To learn calculus, you must memorize the basic steps of
algebra. As many of us know, however, memorization is only the first step.

Elaboration is essential to truly learn

In order to truly learn something, you must “elaborate” it in your
brain. Elaboration is basically the process of learning a lesson and
putting it in your own words for easy retrieval, or to make a skill
part of your own repertoire for easy use. And to be an effective
memorizer, you must make something useful in your brain. You must
connect a new lesson to something you already know.

Learning foreign vocabulary by relating the words to previous words
you know, then putting them into sentences is elaboration. Learning a
physical skill and then actually applying it in practice is
elaboration. To incorporate it into muscle memory, you must do it
enough times that it eventually becomes second nature and no longer
requires conscious thought to perform.

Retrieval is essential for long term retention

To learn a lesson better and to greater solidify it into long-term
memory, you must purposefully retrieve the information in your brain.
So you need to go back and utilize the information or skill you
learned. Multiple times. Studies routinely show that students who
take quizzes at the end of their classes routinely do better on exams
later on. It doesn’t matter what you’re reading; a book, an article,
or this Twitter thread on learning.

Summarize the most important points in your own words (elaboration)
while you’re going through it and then review it again when you have
completed it. For anything you deem important, you can then bookmark
it into a folder to review later, or use any other method you use to
review information. This greatly assists you in remembering and
understanding the information for later, even if you don’t review it
again for a while.

Spaced practice is critical for long-term retention

The more spaced out your practice is, the better you will retain it.
Spaced practice apps such as AnkiDroid
function on this principle. That’s why they work so damn well. In the
long term, a lesson reviewed over several years is much better
retained than one reviewed the same amount of times over several
weeks.

If you truly integrate a technique into your skillset, spaced
practice is built in as you naturally use it. I.e. if you pick up a
martial arts technique then start incorporating it immediately and
routinely, the spaced practice occurs on its own. If you haven’t
picked up an old lesson in many years, you will retain it better than
if you just learned it the first time just now. This is true even if
you struggle with relearning it.

When you struggle with a lesson, you learn better

When you struggle with a lesson, you actually learn it better,
provided that you eventually end up arriving at the conclusion.
Generally speaking, you use a lot more of your brain when you
struggle, which forces you to analyse from many angles.

Get lost in a new city sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Again,
see the next lesson for more on this.

For greater understand a lesson, analyse it from multiple angles

Having one method of learning (ie, being a visual learner) is
actually NOT consistent with learning research. The best way to learn
something is to “go wide.” Visualize it, connect it to something you
know, explain it to someone, draw it on a whiteboard, etc. And most
importantly, put that lesson into practice as much as possible!

You are typically a poor judge of when you are learning

You often don’t realize exactly when you’re learning. It takes
experience and a degree of mindfulness to realize this. This reality
goes hand in hand with lesson number 5. Often times, when you’re
struggling, it doesn’t feel like you’re learning, but you’re learning
better than you are if you don’t struggle - again, provided that you
eventually reach the conclusion. But you are. You don’t realize this
until the next time you pick up where you left off, then you realize
exactly how much you learned.

The feeling that you’re not learning happens a lot when you’re
learning a new set of information that is extremely wide and/or deep,
such as a foreign language. This case is mostly because there’s so
much information, it’s hard to grasp it all. But with time, you
notice progress